Four months of Manor Lords technical overhauls have just moved across from the beta branch to the live build, bringing core under-the-hood improvements to the medieval city-building game. Developer Slavic Magic recently announced it was putting some of its planned content drops and its trade rework on pause briefly, in order to prioritize “taking a hard look at systems that had quietly degraded over time.” Now, that backend work is ready to go, and you should feel the changes immediately. “Next stop: more content.”
Earlier this week, Manor Lords Lead Developer Greg Styczeń expressed his own frustration with the pace of updates. “I wish, more than anyone, that progress on content was quicker, but we’re doing everything we can, and I truly think that the team can’t grow any larger without introducing risk.” He emphasizes that the team’s commitment to fixing bugs and optimizing is important: “Please remember that the game has a relatively large audience, which makes even quite obscure bugs ruin people’s playthroughs on a daily basis. In other words, if it wasn’t important, we wouldn’t prioritize it.”
Now, Styczeń has followed up with the seventh major Manor Lords update. He also takes a moment to thank the community “for the support and the kind words after the last post,” saying it “means a lot.” He then moves into a summary of everything that’s been introduced across the past four months of beta tests that are now in the live version. This includes those aforementioned pathfinding reworks; the system, naturally core to most parts of the Manor Lords experience, had started to crack under the weight of “gradually stacking inefficiencies.”
With Manor Lords update seven, your villagers and workers should spend less time looking for paths. There’s an ‘island’ system designed to quickly reject routes that try to move through different enclosed zones, such as riversides that don’t have a bridge connection between them. Character locomotion and collision has been refactored, as have the squad-move commands (if you want to use the old style of moving squads, simply hold the Alt key while issuing orders). That means less bumping into objects, more efficiency, and hopefully smoother performance overall.
The full patch notes are packed with hundreds of lines of changes, thanks to the months of balancing, bug fixes, and minor improvements. Level-one families no longer consume ale. Families won’t become homeless if their house catches fire, only if it burns down (a minor distinction on the face of it, but an important one). You can now select buildings that end up in the Manor area – this isn’t supposed to happen, so this one is a temporary fix until town walls are ready and working as intended.
Tasks and worker behavior have been overhauled to make your population feel smarter and more responsive to the jobs that actually need to get done, and even let them perform tidy-up duty such as returning handcarts to the shed if they’d otherwise be idle. The boundaries of churches have been expanded as future-proofing for additional levels to come, while quarries are now larger to solve clipping issues when you place them side by side.
Manor Lords update seven is live now on the game’s main branch. With that sorted, it’s back to fresh additions. “For those who worry, even if technical issues are distracting us, we are constantly working on new content and features, it’s just things that aren’t ready to be published yet,” Styczeń reassures. He also notes that any votes he hosts via social media “are usually about low priority improvements that we’re considering,” and not “our main concern at the moment,” so don’t take them the wrong way.